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Wednesday, August 5, 2015

What Leaders Need to Know and Won't Be Told In a Typical Time Management Seminar

Time
management -- it is one of the most popular topics in any professional
development offering. It’s been around for years. Franklin Covey put it on the map, made it mainstream and
it’s one of the most popular
professional development key word searches on Google.

In
general, people are aware of it, think they should be doing it, and believe it
is important. And yet I must say, when
you take a traditional time management seminar or training there are critical issues
that dramatically impact it that won’t be mentioned.

As
a leader or manager, why should you care? Those critical issues
directly impact your company’s bottom line.

I’ve
traveled across North America over the past 16 years teaching time management,
getting organized, and reducing stress seminars. I teach leadership seminars
and coach corporate managers and small business owners and from those experiences
(and my own) have gleaned insights that are
fundamental to effective time management and its connection to company profits.

To
follow are a few of those insights not typically heard and I’ll suggest that
without being aware of them, time management training, as we know it – will be minimally effective. In essence you won’t really be getting what you’re
paying for.

What you won’t
hear in a typical time management seminar:

1. Trouble employees waste time. I
don’t mean to sound heartless. Yet it’s very important that those who lead
understand that more time, energy, and focus is taken up with trouble employees
than with those who are productive.

A
study released by the Future Foundation several years ago entitled: The Hidden
Costs of Poor People Management (worth a read for sure) shared some interesting findings: U.S. managers waste an average of 34 days per year
dealing with underperformance. Senior executives claim they spend seven weeks a
year -- or over an hour per day -- managing badly performing employees.

Why?…well
that leads to #2.

2. The
lack of understanding of behavior and effective performance management wastes
time. One
of the major issues that managers have (as I have met thousands across the
country) is that they do not know how to manage behavior – which in essence is
managing people.

Couple that with the lack of company process and strategy to effectively and quickly
coach folks to improve – or clearly decide it’s time for them to go and that
adds up to a lot of wasted time.

Bottom
line…there is a lot of time spent with employees who should be let go a lot
sooner!

This
situation leads to #3.

3. A
lack of knowledge wastes time. There is more opportunity to train employees and
managers than ever before and opportunities I might add that will not break the
bank and yet, the lack of training in general for employees and particularly
for managers is an epidemic and completely unnecessary.

A
very doable and affordable time management strategy is to have embedded in
every business growth strategy an employee and management growth strategy. I’ve seen it – as employees grow in skills and capabilities, a business
grows. In our talent management practice we suggest 5 core competencies for individual employees. We suggest including them in your on-boarding and each initial performance plan. Click here to learn more

4. Managers
unskilled in managing time waste the time of their staff and negatively impacts
your profits. Ok,
this is self explanatory- time management training should be a fundamental
offering at every company just like employee orientation.

And
for the record, I want to speak out for the many workers of America (from all
50 states I might add) who’ve told me how unorganized and time inefficient some
of their managers are and the incredible amount of unnecessary stress that
creates.

Alrighty,
I could share more, but those are compelling enough for sure.

So,
consider these questions:

Is time management and time management training a part
of your business execution and profit strategy?

Do you believe that the skill
of managing time is fundamental to business success and a company’s bottom
line?

How does your company operations reflect success in the areas mentioned
above…or not?

I’ll
leave you with this final thought and question: If your business could have 3
extra weeks of time for just 1 employee how would you re-direct that time to
impact profits? Where can you get 3 weeks or more?

Here’s how:

After I present the managing interruption
tips in my seminar, I pose this question, “How much time do you think you could
recapture in a day from that one tip?”
I get a myriad of answers ranging from several hours to 15 – 20 minutes.

I then ask them to calculate the answer
using numbers on the low side, so we usually use 30 minutes. Here’s how it looks:

1 Week: 30 mins. a day recaptured x 5
days = 150 mins. (2.5 hrs.)

1 Month: 150 mins. x 4 weeks = 600 mins.
(10 hrs)

1 Quarter: 10 hrs. in a month x 3 mths. =
30 hrs (3.75 days assuming 8 hrs in an average work day).

Think
about it for a moment - taking back 3 weeks of time for just 1 employee. Now,
calculate that for an entire team.
How could that impact a company’s bottom line? Conclusion?...time can be
translated into profits.